


Truly Human

by squarizona



Series: Truly Human 'Verse [1]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, M/M, Organized Crime
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-26
Updated: 2012-12-26
Packaged: 2017-11-22 12:48:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/609982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squarizona/pseuds/squarizona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What's liberty to the people if it goes unprotected?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Truly Human

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, so I don't know what I'm doing. Organized crime in a modern university au. I suppose this one is just going to have to fall out as it may? Join the ride; it's sure to be full of gunslinging fun. (Also this is part one of part one, since I was getting impatient with myself and just kind of wanted to put this up somewhere. Next part will be up soon, promise!)

Men are movable objects. This is the truth that Enjolras had to accept in order to justify war, which he justifies only as the necessary steps to eventual peace, peppered in with the occasional injustice. Like anything else, he supposed, you had to take the difficult and unpleasant first before a bit of sunshine. But one anticipates the sunrise long before it’s probable, curled around their knees in the icy depths of midnight’s cold. Bloody and freezing and broken, life in a trench; this is war, and god, it’s hell.

If anyone could handle it, it was Enjolras. And he would’ve liked to believe that everyone he loved would be able to stand it in the same way—bravely, with their necks out—but given their actions tonight, they would be dead before the morning. In his frustration, he almost swore it. But instead, he settled for biting his cheek and biting out a request: “Marius, just focus.”

It’s possible that Marius couldn’t hear him over the din of festivities; Feuilly and Joly, splitting a fifth of Cherry Noir Grey Goose, dominated most of the sound space with a rousing if misremembered rendition of “Twelve Days of Christmas” though _A Christmas Story_ was already blaring far too loudly on the old tv in the living room. Marius, with his eyes down at the phone in his hand, lagged greatly to the response, which was laconic and unsatisfying. “Hmm?”

“It’s his ladyfriend, E,” Courfeyrac piped from the floor, decked in a set of reindeer antlers and a scarf of tinsel and deftly twisting the point of an opened switchblade against his left index finger. “Love conquers all, especially the red army.” He nodded at Enjolras’s half of the Risk board, then stabbed at a roll of gaudy snowflake paper and dragged it over to continue wrapping presents.

Enjolras crossed his arms and huffed out a quick sigh. “I don’t have time for your little _bijou_ ; I’m trying to ensure the liberty of the free world, here.”

“Yeah, and look how that’s working out…” Courfeyrac muttered, smirking; he waved his knife towards the kitchen where Feuilly was a scratched record stuck on _fiiiiive goooolden riiiiiiings_. “Your house has run afoul with drunken shenanigans; can’t these fine, upstanding young men truly appreciate their free republic in a respectable manner?” Unrolling a bit of paper, he sliced it towards his leg. Joly started shouting about how weird it would be to get so many birds for Christmas, and avian flu.

“Run a _fowl_ , you mean?” Bahorel cut in from his usual place at the dining room table, pointing at Courfeyrac with a tumbler of spiked eggnog wrapped in his palm. His textbooks and stray notes, recently neglected immediately after finals, were pushed to the very edge of the table. In the kitchen, Joly was nigh screaming about what the _hell_ it means to have eight maids a milking.

Courfeyrac returned the point. “ _Nice_ , man. Hey, don’t look—I think this one is for you.” He held up the small cardboard box with _BAHOREL_ scrawled on the side in childish, purple crayon handwriting.

Enjolras, elbow on the table, rested his forehead in his open hand. “I’ll even tell you where to move if you just _do it_. You’re about to be compromised in South America; fortify north, then try to infiltrate Europe through Asia—” Marius held up a finger, the other hand occupied by texting.

A guttural sound from the top of the stairs like someone clearing their throat went mostly unnoticed; Grantaire, thudding bleary eyed down the stairs wrapped in the deep red comforter from Enjolras’s bed, growled again: “Submitting a formal request for everyone to shut the fuck up.” He shuffled by, a small golden bauble Christmas ornament dangling, half-assedly festive, from the back of his beanie; whether purposefully or not, Enjolras ignored him, moving purple army men (commanded by Marius, still deeply involved in his texting) north towards North America.

Grantaire dropped an armful of medium-sized cardboard boxes on the floor next to Courfeyrac, who tried to look bothered. “Just wrap ‘em, I don’t care,” Grantaire murmured, turning towards the kitchen. “They’re going under the tree, beautiful or not.” This had become one of many traditions: for some reason, only one person in the house could wrap presents. Courfeyrac was handy at cutting things up and was a fiend at wrapping presents. Everyone (to Courfeyrac’s secret delight) would leave his marked but unwrapped gifts with him, and he’d take care of it. This, nearly every year, resulted in the wild impatience on Christmas morning—“ _Come on, just open it; it’s cool, I guess, but so-and-so’s is better…_ ”

“Iss Chrissmas,” replied Feuilly, ambling forth. Courfeyrac made a valiant reach for the bottle swinging from Feuilly’s loose hand, but pierced by the well-aimed daggers from Grantaire’s eyes, he went back to wrestling with the tape. Grantaire grabbed the bottle from Feuilly, leaving Feuilly’s hands free to crawl up Enjolras’s back and entwine in his hair, drawling “Fiiiiiiive goooolden… cuuuuurls…” Enjolras, defeating the welling disgust, twisted in his chair and landed a punch square in the middle of Feuilly’s chest, inciting a small, drunken wail of fear. Feuilly retreated to the safety of the kitchen.

“I don’t know what to get her for Christmas,” Marius said with slight disappointment, tapping his phone against his lips in thought.

“Easy,” Courfeyrac said, ripping tape with his teeth. He pressed it along a seam of paper, then set the box aside. “Victoria’s Secret gift card. She’ll love it. Girls love that shit, right?” From across the room, Bahorel nodded and shrugged. Marius rolled his eyes.

Courfeyrac peeked in each of the unwrapped boxes systematically, whistled at the contents of each, then set to wrapping them. Grantaire rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know why you seem impressed, idiot,” he grumbled, pausing to tip the bottle back. “It’s the same thing I do every year.”

Courfeyrac sought out the box with his name on it and hugged it close to his chest. “It’s just that every year I expect you to do something that makes me love you less, but you never disappoint me.”

“Never say never,” Grantaire replied, settling in a straight-backed chair at the dining room table, clicking glasses with Bahorel. He pulled the comforter up to cover his shoulders.

Enjolras reached across the board and snatched Marius’s phone, lifting Courfeyrac’s collar and slipping the phone down his shirt. “ _Now_ will you pay attention?”

They carried on this way for another hour or so, Joly and Feuilly (after only tackling the first two lines and the “comfort and joy” part of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman”) switching to “Joy to the World” and harmonizing quite well for all their soused flushing. _A Christmas Story_ ended at ten, then began again; Grantaire leaned over to turn it off, hardly interrupting his shot-for-shot (Jack Daniels Tennessee Honey Whiskey) match against Bahorel. No one really protested; Courfeyrac had become distracted humming “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” and curling ribbons, sizing up the tiny tree in the corner near the front window of the living room with quiet pride and a slow-burning happiness. Marius, calling for a break, retrieved the Grey Goose from the kitchen and handed it to Courfeyrac in exchange for his phone. Enjolras, looking up for once, glared at Grantaire. “Is that my blanket…?”

Jehan came skittering down the stairs, laundry basket full of wrapped gifts. He assessed the scene from the mid-landing. “Pregaming for midnight Mass? Honestly, it’s shameful…”

“I was pregaming like four hours ago,” Joly said, measuring his words carefully like pouring salt into a teaspoon. He gestured down towards his body, hands coming to a rest on his stomach. “The game’s here. I’m drunk. Where have you _been_?”

Jehan hoisted the laundry basket up, rustling the poorly wrapped gifts inside. “Wrapping stuff.” Reaching the landing, he placed the basket on the floor and nudged it towards the tree with his foot. Watching it slide by, Courfeyrac criticized the artlessness, but it went unheard.

Combeferre, who had been reading a book quietly on the couch, let loose a small laugh. Wandering over, Courfeyrac knocked Combeferre’s elbow with the bottle, then pulled him up to standing, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. “What’re your thoughts, Combeferre? Surely you’re the most noble, sensible one among us. Doing a little drinking before midnight Mass—which will last hours—harmful or harmless?”

“Well, I, um…” Combeferre considered his glass—grape juice, weak stomach. “I guess only time will tell, but I… I suppose so long as it doesn’t interrupt—”

“Harmless!” Courfeyrac shouted, raising the bottle and a cheer from mostly everyone else, inadvertently squeezing Combeferre and spilling his juice.

Combeferre wriggled under Courfeyrac’s grasp, shifting his arm to see the watch on his wrist. “Harmless or not, um, maybe you should all go get cleaned up?”

“Please go,” Enjolras whined, facedown on the table. “You’re all giving me a headache.”

Some walked and some tripped upstairs in straggled waves; Joly and Feuilly raced, and both tumbled out on the top landing before a winner could be declared. Without much of an excuse, Marius slipped away from the game, bumping the table with his knee on accident and scattering men, red and purple, across the continents and into the oceans. Enjolras remained as he was, feeling as defeated as he probably looked. When he could will himself back up to sitting, he saw Grantaire lingering at the dining table across the room, staring out the window and rolling the bottom of his glass on the table. A few moments of unbroken peace, relative silence save the shuffling of feet upstairs behind closed doors. It was snowing outside, soft in the gold-yellow light of the streetlamp. Grantaire’s eyes slid from the window to the floor, from the floor to the other side of the room, and then up to Enjolras. Startled to find that Enjolras was staring back at him, he cleared his throat and lifted his legs to rest on the dining room table. “I was here first.”

Everyone chooses their battles, and Enjolras chose to ignore this one. He left the plastic soldiers where they were and climbed the stairs two at a time. At the end of the hall, past the bathroom in the middle of the hall upstairs where a line was forming (half in anticipation, half to hear the commotion inside, where Combeferre was meekly trying to convince a vomiting Joly that he didn’t have cholera, which was mostly eradicated by now, anyway) and four bedrooms split between eight friends, a small, narrow door like a closet hid a small, narrow flight of stairs up to a small, narrow attic space which was Enjolras’s room. The walls were plastered with maps crisscrossed with thread and pushpins, little mementos from the years: pictures, notes, the like. He fell into bed and leaned over the edge, patting around on the floor for his comforter for a solid minute before remembering where it had gone. He wrapped himself around a pillow and looked towards the streetlight through the low, old single-panel awning window on the wall a few feet from his bed. It wasn’t such a spectacular sight, he thought.

Maybe an hour and a half later, someone knocked on the door at the bottom of the stairs and let himself in. “Enjolras?” Enjolras couldn’t bring himself to roll over, so the intruder committed yet another offense by sitting on the unoccupied space on his bed. “You coming to Mass with us?”

Courfeyrac was unspeakably good at picking up on things and glossing over it without ignoring it, the way your favorite brother doesn’t tattle to your parents after he catches you doing something bad. Enjolras shrugged.

“Mm,” Courfeyrac said, patting him twice on the hip. “Too busy for Jesus, I see.” He leaned forward, towards the opening where a door would normally be, and called “ _He’s too busy for Jesus, Marius_.”

Enjolras rolled onto his back, and the laugh that came with it was more out of sheer curiosity than actual happiness. “Why are you going? _And_ taking everyone with you?”

Courfeyrac smiled, shedding whatever recklessness seen in the boy who wrapped Christmas presents using a switchblade and toasted the harmlessness of pregaming for midnight Mass in the living room just a few short hours ago. His overcoat was unbuttoned, but underneath, a dark brown vest was done up over a pressed, starched, off-white shirt that was rolled at the sleeves. He looked so adult. “The truth?” Courfeyrac straightened his tie. Enjolras propped himself up on his elbows. “If I’m to carry on this way for another year—especially after the year I’ve just had…I’m gonna need a whole lot of blessings,” he said, glancing out the window. He refortified his smile, though it was still soft, unimposing. “Whether or not I think they’ll actually help is another thing.”

Whatever Enjolras wanted to say back, he couldn’t; downstairs, arguments were swelling about who would drive, and Jehan managed to make a final jab (“ _What kinds of people need designated drivers to Mass? I **ask** you…_ ”) before Courfeyrac stood with a sigh, leaning through the doorway with his hands on either sides of the frame, hollering, “Everyone calm down; we can just walk, it’s not that far.” He started to button his coat and made for the stairs, then stopping to turn back. “Hey, E?”

Enjolras turned to him.

“All this—business, I mean—it takes a break on Christmas, okay?” Courfeyrac said, nodding slowly as if it would drive the point home; he slipped a pair of gloves out of his pocket. “I’ll see you later.”

Enjolras rolled over and cracked open his window to see off the retreating party: all done up in scarves and heavy winter coats, a shivering huddle of the best guys he could ever hope to know. And Joly leading the procession, still wobbly on his feet but not dangerously so, walking backwards and directing everyone through a passionate, jumbled rendition of “All I Want for Christmas is You” with a fallen tree switch.

Once they had gone far enough up the road for the singing to take on a ragged Doppler effect (or maybe they were just drunk and cold and slurring a bit), Enjolras sat up in bed, shivering, and pulled his window closed. His room was not insulated, but it was a small price to pay for his solitude, and he paid it happily. Pulling a zip-up hoodie from the bottom of a pile on the floor, he slipped into it and wandered down the small flight of stairs, across the upstairs hall, down the big flight of stairs, and by the time he reached ground level, he felt like the only man left on earth. And just as well, perhaps; there was no movement, no sound, no soul in the house.

His comforter lay atop the dining room table, bundled loosely. He gathered up dishes and glasses, remnants and relics of a once-great civilization. He left them all in the sink without washing any and wandered into the living room to find a spark of humanity lingering where he had once been trying to wage war; in the middle of the Risk board (due southwest of Europe), surrounded by fallen plastic army men, a single shot glass full of something dark and bitter sat on a cocktail napkin bearing the black-ink note _“Calling for a Christmas truce. Come drink with me out front. –R”_

In warfare, it’s considered bad form to ignore a white flag. Enjolras pocketed the note and wondered what kind of institution considered killing others good form.

As promised, Grantaire was on the steps out front, harmlessly curled around a bottle of cognac, as cordial and well meaning as a white flag, Enjolras guessed. He shivered, uncovered.

“Aren’t you cold?” Enjolras asked, toeing a gray sludge-like pile of snow off the steps.

Grantaire tipped the bottle back. “I hardly notice it anymore,” he said, but his teeth were rattling. Enjolras tossed back the shot, retrieved the blanket from inside, then handed it to Grantaire as he sat on the top step next to him.

Grantaire held the blanket as a bundle in his lap. Enjolras, glancing over to see inactivity, coughed. “You’re welcome.”

They sat in silence. Enjolras took the bottle from Grantaire, tipped it, then passed it back. In this void, a tentatively safe place with no responsibilities and no past, Enjolras found himself still tense. Perhaps it was the cold. It was still snowing.

“Well,” Grantaire said, voice gruff and low, scratchy from the cold and the alcohol. “We sure made a mess of this year.”

Pulling the empty shot glass from his jacket pocket, Enjolras leaned over to clink it against Grantaire’s bottle. “We certainly did.”


End file.
